The Ultimate CRM Buyers Guide for Football Clubs
Reading time:
12 mins
Dominik Schreyer is Professor of Sports Economics at WHU and Director of the Center for Sports and Management.
He’s one of Europe’s leading researchers on ticketing behavior, with a special focus on no-shows, season ticket holders, and stadium economics.
His work challenges clubs to see no-shows not just as a logistics issue, but as a strategic blind spot.
What’s the real cost of an empty seat?
What role does perceived value play in attendance?
And how can clubs turn passive fans into active ones?
This interview goes beyond the usual pricing talk and reframes matchday as a product that demands ownership.
An empty seat is never just an empty seat. It’s lost revenue, lost atmosphere, and a flashing warning light for how your product is really perceived. Your sponsors and broadcast partners notice, and so do your future fans.
Whatever the tactic, it starts with excess demand driven by growth beyond your current fan base. Nobody can run a secondary market without buyers — and no club can make attendance thresholds work without fans eager to keep their seats. It’s about creating scarcity, not just pushing inventory.
No-shows happen when the perceived opportunity cost outweighs the perceived value. You won’t always shrink the cost, but you can raise value and cut friction. Start by appointing a product lead for the matchday experience — and let them think like a fan.
Dominik Schreyer’s work offers one of the clearest lenses we have into why fans attend—or don’t. Not as a matter of price or convenience alone, but as a reflection of how they perceive value, purpose, and belonging on matchday.
His framing of no-shows as a "strategic blind spot" cuts deeper than most CRM or ticketing dashboards ever reach. Because when clubs lose control over attendance, they don’t just lose revenue. They lose visibility. They lose the ability to connect behavior with identity. And they lose feedback loops that could help them iterate smarter.
That’s why his research is deeply relevant for CRM, RevOps, and marketing automation teams in football. In a world where we constantly talk about first-party data, empty seats are a form of missing data. They weaken your attribution models. They distort demand forecasting. They erode the link between product usage and individual profiles.
Worse, no-shows are contagious. When enough fans start skipping matches without consequence, it shifts social norms. It devalues season tickets. It raises the perceived opportunity cost for others, especially for marginal games.
But this isn’t just a story of missed seats. It’s a story of underleveraged strategy. Dominik hints at the structural levers clubs can pull: driving excess demand through audience growth, creating scarcity that reinforces value, and appointing dedicated product leads to rethink matchday with fan-centric precision.
You can apply the same thinking across your tech stack. Every CRM system is a garden. Design it with purpose, prepare the soil, then nurture it with data from the right sources—surveys, behavior, transactions, feedback. Miss a channel like attendance attribution, and you leave patches dry. Or worse, cultivate false confidence.
What I take from this: the matchday experience should be owned like a product, measured like a funnel, and treated as a live conversation with your most loyal customers. And sometimes, the loudest signal comes from those who don’t show up at all.
